Blackwater Founder Erik Prince Pitched Private Fighting Force To Nigeria For War Against Boko Haram
A year after Prince proposed private troops for Nigeria, Nigeria is now using mercenaries. Prince’s old firm, Blackwater, used to contract with the U.S. to protect convoys and officials, and train foreign armies — but caused controversy when its employees killed Iraqi civilians.
Erik Dean Prince ,Founder Blackwater
Nigeria’s government is deploying South African mercenaries in its effort to battle the Islamist Boko Haram militia that’s wreaking havoc in the northern part of the country, the New York Times reported last week. The Times didn’t mention Erik Prince, the American businessman and defense contractor who founded the controversial Blackwater Worldwide company, which he left in 2010. (Blackwater later changed its name to Xe and then Academi. Prince met with the President Goodluck Jonathan and gave him a business proposal: to deploy foreign “contractors” for hire, the same type of mercenary force Nigeria is now reportedly using.
Two sources familiar with the meeting in Nigeria said that Prince told the country’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, that his company could assemble a well-trained fighting force of non-Nigerians to battle Boko Haram. The terrorist group kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls last April and recently swore allegiance to the Syrian and Iraqi rebel force Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), known for beheading Western captives. The mercenaries — though Prince himself never uses the term — would lead the combat operations against insurgents, taking the load off the Nigerian military, which has often been accused of corruption and human rights abuses.
It is not clear that the South African mercenaries now reportedly operating in Nigeria are in fact doing the job that Prince had bid to do or even whether they are employed by Prince’s company. Two sources said that Prince’s business pitch was declined by the Nigerian government, which would mean that the mercenaries who are operating in the country are not connected to Prince.
But one source familiar with the deal said that Nigeria’s government did agree to do business with Prince. This source said that he believed the South African mercenaries are indeed part of a force affiliated with Prince.
Boko Haram terrorist network shows the group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau.
Prince is a U.S. citizen, and State Department arms trading rules generally require Americans who broker foreign defense service deals to obtain licenses and get advance approval.Prince is best known for his role in Blackwater, the most active of the private military companies that flourished over the last decade and a half during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In 2004, four Blackwater guards were savagely killed in Fallujah, where their bodies were burned and displayed, sparking a massive U.S. assault against the city and changing the tenor of the war. And in 2007, Blackwater guards in counterassault vehicles in Baghdad’s Nisour Square killed 17 innocent Iraqis in an unprovoked massacre. Last year four of the Blackwater guards were found guilty in a federal trial in Washington, D.C.
In the company’s heyday, it ran security for the State Department and CIA officials throughout Iraq, protected U.S. convoys in the Middle East, trained Afghan forces, and provided aviation services to the U.S. military in Afghanistan. The CIA even briefly hired Prince to set up an assassination wing to kill terrorists, according to former officers and published accounts, though that effort was canceled.
The government of Nigeria did not respond to request for comment on this story. But President Jonathan told the Voice of America news service last week that the foreign contractors were “technicians,” and a government spokesman has been quoted in the BBC saying that foreign troops were acting as trainers.
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